Lecture
Crisis psychology is a specialized field within psychology that studies and helps people cope with crisis situations. The subject matter of crisis psychology is the understanding of the psychological and emotional aspects associated with crises, as well as the development of methods and strategies for supporting people in such situations.
The tasks of crisis psychology include:
Understanding crises: Research into the nature and types of crises, their causes and consequences. This is important for a deeper understanding of how crisis situations affect a person’s psyche and emotions.
Helping to cope with emotional stress: Crisis psychology helps people develop skills of emotional self-regulation and effective stress management in crisis situations.
Facilitating conflict resolution: Assistance in resolving conflicts that may arise during crises, including intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts.
Support in decision-making: Helping people analyze alternative courses of action and make sound decisions under the difficult conditions of a crisis.
Facilitating the process of grief therapy: Assistance in working through feelings of loss and grief that may arise after crisis events, such as the loss of a loved one or a serious trauma.
Teaching survival strategies: Helping to teach people survival and adaptation skills in extreme conditions, such as natural disasters or accidents.
Supporting recovery: Assistance in restoring mental and emotional well-being after a crisis and during the recovery phase.
Research and development of support methods: Ongoing research and development of new methods and techniques that can help people cope better with crises.
Crisis psychology has a wide range of applications and can be useful both for individual assistance and for working with groups of people in various crisis situations, including natural disasters, accidents, conflicts, the loss of loved ones, and other severe events.
The contemporary socio-economic and cultural situation of human development largely contradicts the customary ways of building behavioral strategies based on natural (biological) stimuli and social (societal) norms. Contemporary human beings find themselves faced with the necessity, more often than their recent ancestors, of independently responding to an unusual, situational factor, since their experience contains no similar strategies for overcoming or emerging from unfamiliar situations. Thus, the growth of social and natural cataclysms, on the one hand, and the impossibility of using the biological code and the experience of generations to overcome them, on the other hand, have to a large extent determined the growth of psychological traumatization of the population, which cannot but have a negative effect on mental health. The applied psychology of the twentieth century answered questions that had been formulated in the nineteenth century. This explains the emergence, at the beginning of the century, of psychoanalysis and behaviorism. While psychoanalysis addressed problems of mental health, behaviorism addressed problems of learning and labor activity. The nineteenth century was a «calm» time in terms of psychological trauma. The rapid development of civilization has always been accompanied by a decrease in human protection from its consequences.
The twentieth century began as an epoch of rupture, which P. Tillich later called a time of the decline of civilization that threatens spiritual self-affirmation. German classical philosophy began to speak of the alienation of the human being from the products of their labor, but even more traumatic was the alienation of the human being from other human beings and, as a consequence, alienation from oneself, from one’s own essence. Let us note the grounds that determined the necessity of establishing crisis psychology as an independent branch of psychological knowledge. The first ground is the peaceful coexistence of various psychological practices: pedagogical, sport, engineering, medical — each of which has its own subject matter, its own technology, and its own instruments for the psychological approach to the person depending on the type of activity. It should be added that this is a «peaceful» type of activity, but in any sphere of human life activity, situations (events) are increasingly encountered that go beyond the customary bounds and require an adequate response, yet this response falls outside the subject matter of that particular branch of psychological science. Regardless of the branch of psychology, the response turns out to be similar in a crisis situation in sport, medicine, pedagogy, and so on. The second ground is the existence of various psychological schools and orientations, each of which developed its own explanatory paradigm, its own research methods, its own way of intervening in the psychic life of the person. Thus, classical behaviorism undertook to «construct» a person to any order, provided that a particular set of stimuli was directed at the personality in a timely manner. Psychoanalysis is ready to help a person get rid of almost any problem, provided it can reach the depths of their psyche, the conflicts of early childhood, and analyze childhood drives, childhood fears, and childhood prohibitions. Without denying either the basic tenets of behaviorism or, even more so, the influence of childhood psychological traumas on a person’s life activity, we believe that human life itself, at every one of its periods, fully determines psychic life and behavior.
A person’s life path is characterized, above all, by the presence of diverse events, some of which are interpreted by the person as traumatic. These events, the «nodal points of the life path» (S.L. Rubinstein), largely determine the further scenario of a person’s life, their mental and physical health. The difficulty for an outside observer (the psychologist) in understanding the nature of the influence of an external event on a person’s life activity is determined by the fact that external events are perceived, experienced, interpreted, and classified as critical on the basis of subjective variables. We cannot predict how a specific event will be reflected in the consciousness of a specific person. An event can of course be recorded as a certain fragment of reality, but as soon as a human being appears within it, they change reality «in their own image and likeness». The methodological basis for establishing crisis psychology as an independent science. Domestic applied psychology has passed through a short but intensive path of development, from the proclamation of the differences between the academic and applied research paradigms (A.M. Etkind, 1986) to the recognition of the causes of the crisis (schism, F.E. Vasilyuk, 1998).
An essential moment that brought psychology to a state of crisis is the methodological approach to the human being as a voiceless, non-subjective thing, monologue as the principle of analysis, in which the word and the activity belong to the psychologist. It has been established that objective methods of research separate the subject and object of psychological research (V.P. Zinchenko, M. Mamardashvili). Hence the paradigm of classical psychological research is untenable, above all, on its decisive point, which states: the object is independent (must be independent) of the subject. Crisis psychology, being at its core a psychology, cannot allow itself to separate subject from object, to become an objective psychology. The objective approach turns psychology not only into something supposedly independent of the foundations of a person’s being as lived and experienced, but also creates a subjectless science, which can no longer be a science of the soul. All this predetermined the necessity of establishing crisis psychology as an independent branch of psychological science and practice.
The aim of the course is: to become acquainted with the methodological foundations of crisis psychology, with explanatory theories of human behavior in situations of uncertainty and unpredictability. The most important task of the course is to teach the skills of independently constructing programs of psychological assistance to a person in a crisis and post-crisis situation of the life path. When examining the course of crisis psychology from the point of view of its subject matter, the following points may be noted. In the lecture course, we will examine the state of the human psyche in critical co-events.
In indescribable situations of choice, it is difficult for a person to determine and orient themselves by customary means. Events of the life path are the basic constructs that largely determine the subject matter of crisis psychology. Therefore, crisis psychology is a branch of psychological knowledge in which the person’s personality is examined from the point of view of their being, in relation to their being. In this perspective, consciousness is being-for-itself, while the external world is being-in-itself. Thus, the course in crisis psychology studies the characteristics of human behavior in situations of crisis events and catastrophe, strategies for overcoming the uncertainties of the life path, intrapersonal explanatory mechanisms, and programs of psychological assistance and support. Proceeding from the aim and subject matter of crisis psychology, the course proposes the following tasks for study: — analysis of theoretical approaches in crisis psychology; — mastery of skills in the psychodiagnosis of traumatic states; — preparation for choosing a strategy of psychological assistance to a person in a crisis situation; — knowledge of the main methods of providing psychological assistance and support.
Questions:
1. The subject matter of crisis psychology.
2. The tasks of the course in crisis psychology.
3. Reasons for the establishment of crisis psychology as an independent branch of psychological science
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